The Origins of the Bible and Early Modern Political Thought
Revelation and the Boundaries of Scripture

Explores the cultural functions played in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by accounts of the Bible's origins.

Travis DeCook (Author)

9781108830812, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 March 2021

325 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.48 kg

In this book, Travis DeCook explores the theological and political innovations found in early modern accounts of the Bible's origins. In the charged climate produced by the Reformation and humanist historicism, writers grappled with the tension between the Bible's divine and human aspects, and they produced innovative narratives regarding the agencies and processes through which the Bible came into existence and was transmitted. DeCook investigates how these accounts of Scripture's production were taken up beyond the expected boundaries of biblical study, and were redeployed as the theological basis for wide-reaching arguments about the proper ordering of human life. DeCook provides a new, critical perspective on ideas regarding secularity, secularization, and modernity, challenging the dominant narratives regarding the Bible's role in these processes. He shows how these engagements with the Bible's origins prompt a rethinking of formulations of secularity and secularization in our own time.

Introduction: Eternal Word, Historical Artifact - Biblical Transcendence and Immanence in the Wake of Humanism and Reformation
1. The Primordial Bible: William Tyndale's Social Vision and the Limits of Disenchantment
2. The extrinsic Bible: scriptural revelation, secularity, and social organization in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis
3. Scripture atomized: sovereignty, secularization, and the metaphysics of the Bible in Hobbe's Leviathan
4. The trial of Scripture: John Milton, individual freedom, and the providential immanence of the Bible's textual history
5. The religion of the state: Spinoza's reimagining of the Bibles origins and the interiorization of religion
Conclusion: the Bible and time.

Subject Areas: History of religion [HRAX], Religion & politics [HRAM2], Western philosophy: Medieval & Renaissance, c 500 to c 1600 [HPCB], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD], Literature: history & criticism [DS]